“Go on.
Go on.
What is it I am to do?”
Byron watches his slow and ceaseless hand, musing.
“He ain’t never admitted that he killed her.
And all the evidence they got against him is Brown’s word, which is next to none.
You could say he was here with you that night.
Every night when Brown said he watched him go up to the big house and go in it.
Folks would believe you.
They would believe that, anyway.
They would rather believe that about you than to believe that he lived with her like a husband and then killed her.
And you are old now.
They wouldn’t do anything to you about it that would hurt you now.
And I reckon you are used to everything else they can do.”
“Oh,” Hightower says. “Ah.
Yes. Yes.
They would believe it.
That would be very simple, very good.
Good for all.
Then he will be restored to them who have suffered because of him, and Brown without the reward could be scared into making her child legitimate and then into fleeing again and forever this time.
And then it would be just her and Byron.
Since I am just an old man who has been fortunate enough to grow old without having to learn the despair of love.” He is shaking, steadily; he looks up now.
In the lamplight his face looks slick, as if it had been oiled.
Wrung and twisted, it gleams in the lamplight; the yellowed, oftwashed shirt which was fresh this morning is damp with sweat. “It’s not because I can’t, don’t dare to,” he says; “it’s because I won’t!
I won’t! do you hear?” He raises his hands from the chairarms. “It’s because I won’t do it!” Byron does not move.
His hand on the desk top has ceased; he watches the other, thinking It ain’t me he is shouting at.
It’s like he knows there is something nearer him than me to convince of that Because now Hightower is shouting, “I won’t do it!
I won’t!” with his hands raised and clenched, his face sweating, his lip lifted upon his clenched and rotting teeth from about which the long sagging of flabby and puttycolored flesh falls away.
Suddenly his voice rises higher yet. “Get out!” he screams. “Get out of my house!
Get out of my house!” Then he falls forward, onto the desk, his face between his extended arms and his clenched fists.
As, the two old people moving ahead of him, Byron looks back from the door, he sees that Hightower has not moved, his bald head and his extended and clenchfisted arms lying full in the pool of light from the shaded lamp.
Beyond the open window the sound of insects has not ceased, not faltered. Chapter 17
THAT was Sunday night.
Lena’s child was born the next morning.
It was just dawn when Byron stopped his galloping mule before the house which he had quitted not six hours ago.
He sprang to the ground already running, and ran up the narrow walk toward the dark porch.
He seemed to stand aloof and watch himself, for all his haste, thinking with a kind of grim unsurprise:
‘Byron Bunch borning a baby.
If I could have seen myself now two weeks ago, I would not have believed my own eyes.
I would have told them that they lied.’
The window was dark now beyond which six hours ago he had left the minister.
Running, he thought of the bald head, the clenched hands, the prone flabby body sprawled across the desk.
‘But I reckon he has not slept much,’ he thought. ‘Even if he ain’t playing—playing—’ He could not think of the word midwife, which he knew that Hightower would use. ‘I reckon I don’t have to think of it,’ he thought. ‘Like a fellow running from or toward a gun ain’t got time to worry whether the word for what he is doing is courage or cowardice.’
The door was not locked.
Apparently he knew that it would not be.
He felt his way into the hall, not quiet, not attempting to be.
He had never been deeper into the house than the room where he had last seen the owner of it sprawled across the desk in the full downglare of the lamp.
Yet he went almost as straight to the right door as if he knew, or could see, or were being led.
‘That’s what he’d call it,’ he thought, in the fumbling and hurried dark. ‘And she would too.’ He meant Lena, lying yonder in the cabin, already beginning to labor. ‘Only they would both have a different name for whoever did the leading.’
He could hear Hightower snoring now, before he entered the room.